


Goin' Viral

by the_gaysian_agenda



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: AU where they were actually friends, Aftermath, Angst, BUT CONNOR STILL DIED, But also, Gen, Homophobia, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Not, Social Media, Twitter, i mean a little comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 02:06:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14345679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_gaysian_agenda/pseuds/the_gaysian_agenda
Summary: Evan's sick of it.He's sick of being made to go through years of late-night conversations about trees and acorns and drugs and anxiety and emptiness and ice cream and snowboarding and the math homework. He’s already seen it all— he’s already spent hours, up until sunrise, going over every email, from the long ones Connor sent him about Zoe or rehab to the tiny ones that don’t say anything other than “acorn”.





	Goin' Viral

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by the cut song going viral!! also i listened to In the Bedroom Down the Hall and literally cried during the entire 16 hr plane ride

Evan desperately clings to a subway rail, the metal searing a revolting combination between uncomfortably sticky-hot and burning-cold. Thoughts of the germs that must construct mansions on it almost distract him from the people— all of the people. 

They’re pressing in, each stop only suffocating him a little bit more. God, he thinks numbly, this is worse than dinner with the Murphy’s, worse than the School Hallways. 

He doesn’t really know if he’s religious anymore, but he prays for the ride to be over soon. Just in case there really is anyone out there. 

Even if there was, he thinks a little bitterly, they wouldn’t help me. 

It’s okay, it’s just the truth. 

The subway jolts and someone slams into his backpack, knocking him forwards into the doors.

Which are, thankfully, closed. 

“Shit, sorry.” A shaggy brunet guy pats him on the backpack. Evan spins around. 

“No- uh- it’s totally- I mean, the train- er, the subway- it’s cool like I do that all the time- I mean I would, if I rode the subway but I don’t ever ride the subway because I hate the subway but I have this assignment- for math class- it’s not for my therapist because I don’t have a therapist because I don’t have issues because why would I have a therapist if I didn’t have issues and so I wouldn’t have an assignment from my therapist so it’s for math- we’re- we’re tracking distance. Traveled by subway. Which I do, all the time.” Evan thinks that his face is going to go up in flames or maybe he’ll just liquify and slip out the bottom of the subway door, outside and away from this hell train. 

“Uh... okay, man.” The guy looks about his age but just. More senior-y, like he probably dates and goes out to parties and texts his friends in class and owns four different pairs of white sneakers. “Wait- shit- dude, are you, like, okay?” 

“Yeah I’m good I’m just chilling on the subway!” Evan lets out a choked breath. He thinks that if he tried to lift his head up his neck would snap in half and god, that would be embarrassing and someone would probably take a video that would go viral and then he’d really die, neck-less or not. 

“Shit, man, you’re- you gotta breathe.” Senior Boy bends down a little, which is weird because he isn’t that much taller than Evan, and makes Evan’s nightmares come true- he looks him in the eye. 

And for the first time, Evan properly looks at his face. And at his eyes. Which are a little bit droopy, a kind of hazel-brown that looks dark right now but when he blinks and his long eyelashes catch the harsh subway lights his irises go light. 

Evan thinks he might pass out. He can hear his heartbeat pounding in his earlobes. He blinks a little harder, not that he’d cry, on the subway or anything ridiculous like that. 

The boy clears his throat. 

“Hey kid, what’s your stop?” He has shaggy brown hair that goes a bit past his ears, but the similarities stop there. His hair is kind of straight and his jaw is softer than- than  _ his _ .

“I- I’m sorry- I’m the next one, the airport- yeah.” 

The subway dings and a woman with a grainy voice announces that they have arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport. 

Not-him takes a step back, brow furrowing. His hairline is lower. 

_ Lower than whose?  _   
  


“Okay, good luck out there, bro.” White-sneaker Senior gives him what’s probably a reassuring pat on the shoulder for normal people, but it just hurts against Evan’s tense muscles. His neck hurts.

Evan nods up-and-down, up-and-down, and trips over two feet and three bags in his rush to get out of there. 

He is never taking a different car from his mom again. 

Evan stumbles onto the airport platform and manages to keep from breaking down before seeing his mom waving frantically at him from one of the escalators. 

“Hiya, great job!” She beams at him, and he can’t help but feel like he’s deceiving her somehow. He did not do a Great Job in any sense of the words. “I’m so proud of you- now let’s get going! Woo! California, here we come!” She hikes a battered, faded gray suitcase onto the escalator.   
Evan, dragging his blue duffle, trails behind.    
  
—   
  
California is nice, he guesses. 

They’re not anywhere fancy, like Stanford or San Francisco or Los Angeles, but it’s still... nice. Downtown Mountain View is nice. The sidewalks are nice and the ramen is good and the plants are always dead and it’s always hot but it’s nice. 

They’re just there for the week- as “Heidi-Evan Bonding Time”, as his mom put it, but Evan’s too relieved to care. 

He doesn’t think he can look any of the Murphys in the eyes. Alana, who he’d talked to maybe twice in the past seven years, won’t stop trailing him outside his locker about fundraising and releasing more emails for the Connor Project, and Jared just seems mad at him. Or at least, he’s meaner than usual. When Evan asked, Jared had said something about “not telling him anything” and “best friend, my ass”, but Jared wasn’t even really Evan’s friend. They were only Family Friends. Which apparently, is different. 

So it’s nice, unbelievably nice to get away from his town, where people now know him as the Dead Stoner Kid’s Weird Best Friend. All because of a few stupid emails- now people think that they know him, that he’s their New Best Friend for until whenever they lose interest in the Poor Sad Boy’s Death, whenever they find out about the drugs or the drinks or the smoking, whenever it suddenly isn’t as Tragic or Romantic or Goth Aesthetic, whatever that even is. 

Evan is sick of it. 

He’s sick of being made to go back through- go through years of late-night conversations about trees and acorns and drugs and anxiety and emptiness and ice cream and snowboarding and the math homework. 

He’s already seen it all— he’s already spent hours, up until sunrise, going over every email, from the long ones Connor sent him about Zoe to the tiny ones that don’t say anything other than “acorn”.  

He’s spent more time going through every conversation in the past week than he has sleeping and standing. He’s spent so much time trying to figure out what he missed, where he went wrong.  

If it weren’t for the Murphy family, Evan would probably give up on the Connor Project— it’s important and all, but he’s too selfish. 

He wants to cling to and wrap up every memory of light eyelashes and sour apples from the orchard that Connor hated but went to anyways because Evan liked it there and secret glances in the hallways, he wants to take them all and covet them and keep them forever for himself.    
There’s a fear, lingering in the back of his mind and meshed with every single other fear that keeps him talking in his therapist’s office and keeps him up at night and afraid in the sunlight, that by sharing Connor— sharing his memories of Connor— that he’ll lose them. That they’ll dilute until the only thing he remembers is a faint sense of unripe crabapples and curly brown hair and the haze of cigarette smoke. 

_ Cigarette smoke.  _

Evan hated Connor smoking or doing drugs or drinking until his breath was god-awful and his words dragged and eyes reddened and his skin heated up until his hair was damp and sweat beaded on the very tip of his nose. 

But Not-Sober Connor laughed more and clung more and tried to braid Evan’s hair and needed ice cream to cheer him up when he couldn’t do it. So they compromised. Connor was only allowed to be high or smoking or drunk less than twenty-five percent of the time he spent with Evan. 

And since Evan was scared- is still scared, always will be scared, but for different reasons now- of Connor getting hurt or killed in some alleyway, he made sure to drag Connor to the orchard or to A La Mode or to the abandoned parking lot behind the  _ Denny’s _ with the missing sign or to just video call him or to email him. And Evan got to hang out with Conner, which was like, the ultimate bonus to Keeping Connor Safe. It worked out. 

Until it didn’t.    
  
—    
  
Evan shifts uncomfortably, sitting along outside a tiny Vietnamese restaurant. His mom just went inside to pay, abandoning him at the little metal table, sitting on one of the little metal chairs.    
He can feel the stares of a group of teenagers, extremely intimidating in their trendy shoes and ripped jeans and brightly colored crop-tops. 

Connor secretly dressed well, and kind of trendily, Evan suddenly thinks. All fishnets and ripped jeans and combat boots and rings and pins and jewelry. Not that anybody seemed to notice, or if they did, they were too either intimidated or weirded out by the whole school-druggie thing to care. 

_ You cared, and you noticed,  _ his mind whispers.  _ But you still failed.  _

The hair on the back of his neck prickles again, and Evan swallows hard. He prays desperately for them to leave or for his mom to come back and rescue him or for the ground to open up and swallow him into the cobblestone sidewalk. 

But none of these (increasingly appealing) things happen, because the teenagers— oh god, he can hear them right behind him.  _ Are they walking up to him?  _

They could be just, y’know, walking by the pho shop like every other pedestrian, but one taps him on the shoulder. 

“Hey, are you Evan Hansen?” A girl says in a very California Accent. It’s kind of nasally and kind of lilting and it intimidates the hell out of Evan. 

He turns, slowly, trying to work down the sudden block in his throat. 

“Uh yeah, that’s- that’s me. I’m Evan Hansen. Which you knew, but- I’m. Him. Yeah.” He stutters, staring straight at the wilting rose bush, wired desperately against the store wall across the sidewalk from him. 

“Oh my god, did you really know Connor Murphy?” Another girl pushes forward, grabbing the arm of his metal chair. Evan swallows. She has wavy brown hair. 

“...Yeah. I knew him.” Her hair is blocking his view of the sad rose bush. 

“I’m so sorry! Oh my gosh that must’ve been so hard for you, especially since you guys were like, not even  _ out! _ Holy shit, no one even knew that you guys knew each other, that sounds so difficult!” A girl with a short, blindingly-blonde bob whips out her phone. 

“Oh my god, Kate, they never said they were dating!” Brunette reprimands her friend. “I’m so sorry for your loss, it was so brave of you to make that speech!” 

_ Dating?  _

“It’s- it’s okay- but we weren’t- we didn’t date.” Evan tries, lamely. “I mean like- thinking someone’s like- hot is different from dating, right? No- like- like not hot but friend-hot like I stare at your eyelashes daily and play with your hair and borrow your jackets hot?” 

The teens just stare at Evan. 

“No no no I swear- I mean like even if you kiss once on sort of accident and like- I guess, hug a lot? Not like cuddle but like. Horizontal hug? Cause whenever you called it cuddling he got embarrassed? Like that’s not dating because dating’s like going to orchards together because one of you likes trees and getting ice cream at two AM or just spending all of your free time together- wait no, I mean- we did that stuff but like- I’m straight?” Evan trips over his own words, frantically waving his hands around, trying to explain. He cares too much about this, for some reason, but inside he knows. It doesn’t matter. 

_ Connor is dead.  _

The blond girl and a dark-haired boy with a buzz cut put away their phones. Evan can’t tell whether they were recording the whole thing or now, but for once, he can’t find it in him to care. 

The brown-haired girl takes a breath. Then lets it out. Then takes another one and opens her mouth like she’s about to say something, then just closes it again. 

“Is it- can we take a photo with you? And ask a few questions— about— about Connor? I just made an executive decision and we’re opening up a branch of the Connor Project for North California. Right now.” 

Evan feels a bit light-headed but he mumbles something that must come off as agreement, because they wave over some stranger with a sort of effortless ease that Evan truly envies and crowd around him for a photo. 

Blonde girl whips out her phone again and a redheaded boy with tiny curls sticks his phone next to Evan’s jaw, the recording app open.    
  
“So, how did you and Connor meet?” 

_ Oh, uh, funny story, actually, I broke my ankle in seventh grade and then my fri- my  _ family _ friend made fun of Connor’s sister and ran away and then Connor thought I was laughing at him but I was just coughing because I had something in my throat so he pushed me over and then later in the library during lunch he apologized and signed my ankle-cast even though it was on my ankle but neither of us really had any friends, so. Yeah.  _

“What was Connor like?” 

_ Um, he had kind of curly but not full curly more like wavy brownish hair but not reddish brown more of a gold-brown? And he started growing his hair out pretty early but for like a year he had short hair but I always liked the long hair better and sometime he’d braid it or I’d braid it or he’d let me brush it or he’d tie it up or put it in a bun and he liked to paint his nails and I always made fun of him for having a huge collection that he pretended was Zoe’s but it was all his but he only ever used like, two colors, aside from when we did matching nails once over the summer for fun but I ended up having an asthma attack from the nail fumes.  _

_ So then when we went to this ice cream store that night and then to Denny’s for dinner and at Denny’s this guy called Connor a fairy so then Connor beat him up and we weren’t allowed in that Denny’s anymore and I couldn’t order my own food anyways so I’d pretend to be extra hungry to my mom so that she’d order me extra and then I’d call Connor and we’d just sit together in the parking lot behind Denny’s because no one goes there because some guy set a trash can on fire and none of the streetlights back there work so they’d leave us alone and no one came by— but I said that already.  _

_ And it was always hard for both of us but Connor got worse after freshman year— I didn’t see him that summer because turns out, he’d been at some health-guru camp the entire summer where he wasn’t allowed to eat gluten or dairy or processed sugar for his anger issues but he never got really mad at me, except for once when we argued about my anxiety- because I have anxiety, I have that. Then he didn’t respond to my emails for a week so I got worried and I tried to talk to him at school even though we don’t talk at school because I was worried about what Jar-  my family friend would think and what my mom would think and if Connor would have to beat up more people. But now I— I really regret that.  _

_ Uh, I think I was especially afraid ‘cause Connor started smoking and it was really bad in junior year but he went to rehab and I  _ know _ he wanted to get better but he was scared and he called me and we talked all the time and he was really trying I swear but it was so hard at home and I tried to help so I talked to him at school so we fought about everything that year like the drugs and my anxiety and the medications we were both supposed to be taking and the therapists we were supposed to be talking to but then I found out that he was put in  _ conversion therapy _ for half the summer and for the other half he was in rehab and he found out that I didn’t break my arm on accident then he pushed me and then tried to apologize but then ran off because I. messed up and that was- that was the last time I saw him and they wouldn’t let me see him in the hospital and I haven’t seen him since and I yelled at him and now I’ll never see him again and they’ll slick back his hair or they’ll cut it and he hated that and they won’t do his makeup or his nails the way he liked to- with the eyeliner smudged and bottom lashes drawn, he taught me, and they’ll take off his nail polish even though he liked his nails black.  _

__  
“Oh- uh- thank you so much for sharing all of this, is there- is there anything else?”   
  


_ I- sorry- I think you’ve all seen my speech but uh- I just- I just really regret not talking to him for that last week or as much through junior year, I wish— I wish I could see him again, just once. Connor, Connor if you’re- if you’re out there, if you can hear me or to the people like Connor in the world- please just— you can make it through this and it’s hard but you can make it through this, just please— if I could talk to him again, it would be to tell him that— that since I think love isn’t always romantic or platonic or familiar or anything like that, sometimes it’s just love and that’s okay, I would tell him- tell you, Connor Murphy, that I love you.  _

_ I love you all, everyone who is going through something because we all go through something and it’s so important to know that you are loved and I know that maybe it isn’t much, but I, Evan Hansen, love you.  _   
  


“Thank you so much, thank you for your time. Thank you for talking to us on this Saturday afternoon in California, this has been the Connor Project with Evan Hansen. Stay tuned for more updates and ways to get involved, and if you have stories about Connor or other messages, our submissions are always open and our paypal, for donations is always open and linked!”    
  
—   
  
Evan switches Airplane Mode off on Sunday at two AM, walking shakily up the steps into his room. 

His phone stops for a second. 

He clicks Twitter again. Nothing registers. 

His phone flickers, then goes black. 

Evan sighs and restarts the phone. It’s so old— he can’t even use it properly anymore, apparently. 

He lies down to sleep. He’s so tired.    
  
When he wakes up, it’s ten in the morning. He can hear his mother, still asleep in the next room. 

Evan rolls over, shrugging his faded bedsheets off. He turns on his phone.

_ You have: 2,734 new notifications. Clear?  _

Blearily, he opens Twitter. 

The app takes one-hundred-eighty-six seconds to load. He counts it. 

When he opens it, thousands of people have tweeted and liked and found his personal, previously three-follower private account. 

He scrolls through the mentions. Clips of the new interview, older clips of his speech, compilations of Connor’s yearbook photos, Alana, Jared, the NorCal Jared Project Association, and sketchy-looking redbubble accounts are advertising Connor Murphy merchandise for a “good cause”. Evan’s classmates are posting every picture they have of Connor, mostly ones with blurry, skinny figures clad in all back hidden in the background. 

He scrolls a little further down. People have captioned and made gifs of his interview, dissecting his words, from  _ acorns _ to  _ Denny’s _ to  _ Family Friend _ . He scrolls past an argument about the way Evan talked, the way his pupils flickered, the way he held his hands in his lap. 

Evan stops on a set of gifs, all of him— of him crying. 

He doesn’t remember crying in the interview. 

But when he checks the film- from  _ NorcalConnorProject.org- _ he cries. 

He watches himself cry. 

He watches a boy named Evan Hansen cry silent tears for the world to see- he watches Evan Hansen ramble about Connor Murphy’s eyes and about his own anxiety and about Connor’s therapy and can’t help but know that somewhere in there, he crossed a line. He broke some sort of silent rule that says you cry and list the spelling bees won by the Dead Boy, but you don’t tell the world about nights and mornings outside of  _ Denny’s _ and you don’t cry on twitter or a  _ Wix dot com _ website about how the Dead Boy liked to paint his nails or do his eyeliner. 

He can almost feel himself losing a piece of Connor— like the worst tooth removal ever, pulling and twisting slowly until he’s sobbing into the tiny screen. 

And he cries until he can’t anymore, until he’s just shaking and dry-heaving and missing something. 

His mother opens her door and her footsteps shuffle, heavy and slow, down the staircase. 

Evan locks his door. 

And scrolls down a little farther, 

Posts calling Connor a  _ fag _ , posts calling Evan a  _ fag _ , posts praising their  _ “forbidden gay love uwu owo”, _ posts about how it’s  _ “a real life queer tragedy, gay culture, Moffatt take notes”, _ whatever all of that means. 

Other posts saying to “ _ STOP fucking FETISHIZING them CONNOR MURPHY a SENIOR IN HIGH SCHOOL is LITERALLY DEAD _ ”, posts calling Evan a necrophiliac, cursing the Murphy family, cursing out Evan’s family, people calling Evan a  _ “pure anxious bby”. _

Videos of people crying in the thumbnails with their captions in all-caps, saying things like  _ I KNEW CONNOR MURPHY, RIP CONNOR MURPHY 2K18, ON CONNOR MURPHY, I HOOKED UP WITH CONNOR MURPHEY??, # _ _ RIPCONNORMURPHY2K18 _ _.  _

Evan stays there, tear tracks drying into tear stains, eyes stinging and clouding, unable to do anything but scroll further down, unmoving. 

He passes through the art people have drawn of what they think Connor looked like, of what they’ve seen of Evan, of Jared, of Alana, of the NorCal Connor Project’s creators. People advertising makeup tutorials “ _ inspired by Connor Murphy!!”. _

But after hours of searching, despite not knowing what he’s searching for, Evan finds it. 

Evan finds people organizing their own Connor Projects for their own cities, organizing fundraisers and collaborations with suicide  and mental health help organizations. Evan finds people from his school writing what they knew of Connor— not just the drugs or screaming, but the little drawings he left on the whiteboards in classrooms he snuck into to ditch his other classes. He finds Zoe’s twitter, where she’s posted three picture of a young, chubby, rosy-cheeked Connor. 

She’s turned the comments off, but Evan tries to message her anyways. 

_ “hey, is it okay if I post a photo and a final statement for Connor?”  _

He stares at it. He’s too tired overanalyze right now, wrecked with tears and tangled in bedsheets and feeling emptier, lonelier than he’s felt since seventh grade. 

_ “sorry if I said too much in that interview i freaked out.” _

He sends, as an afterthought.

Connor talked about Zoe so often that Evan doesn’t know how to talk to Zoe herself. Evan’s never really talked to her, but he feels like, in the least creepy way, that he maybe knows her a little bit. Having Zoe mad at him, especially with her eyes that almost match Connors but not quite and her hair that’s straighter and neater but still so close to Connor’s, would maybe be the final blow, the final thing that blows whatever he’s still clinging to away from him. 

_ “yeah sure and its cool my parents r just glad that ppl r thinking of connor n our fam”  _

He can feel the relief sweep through him. 

_ “Can we talk later too I’m ditching tmrw meet me in gym outside lockers behind bleachers”  _

The relief is gone as soon as it appeared. 

She hates him, and then he’ll truly have to let go of Connor because it’s not like Connor was ever his, Zoe was his sister of course she has priority. 

And Connor cared about her so much that it’d just be wrong to deny her anything there. 

Evan tries to stand up, but ends up just swinging his legs off of the bed, dangling over the side. 

_ “Connor, stop!” Evan kicked around, wiggling his toes.  _

_ “Gross, feet.” Connor attacks again, tickling the bottoms of his feet. Evan shrieks. Connor laughs.  _

_ “Don’t laugh at me, I’ve heard your voice go way higher!”  _

_ “Fuck you, I have a very manly voice!”  _

Evan settles for searching through his camera roll. He blindly selects two photos that he think are some of the better ones of Connor, the ones where his hair is highlighted in gold by the sunlight and his brow has relaxed into something that makes him look almost—  _ content _ . 

And Evan likes to think that maybe he was, that maybe Connor was content just to be with him. 

_ But if he was content, then why— ?  _

Evan swallows the thought down with the fresh tears, and goes back through to find a photo of his Connor. 

And he finds it, he finds Connor, but he finds him in a one of those two AM  _ Denny’s _ photos. It was just after they’d been kicked out and Connor had just turned sixteen and he had a black eye and broken two nails (which he’d complain about for weeks afterwards to Evan), but in the grainy photo, lit by a dying yellow streetlight, he’s laughing harder than Evan can even remember.    
  
The next photo in his camera is a video— of that same night, of Connor scratching their names into the old, broken  _ Denny’s _ sign in the parking lot next to the singed dumpster. The camera’s shaky and Evan can hear himself laughing and yelling something not even he can understand but Connor, whose cheekbones aren’t quite as pronounced and whose eyes aren’t as red or puffy at sixteen, yells back and laughs and screams and whoops at the cars whizzing down the highway, separated from them by just a disintegrating wire fence.    
  
Evan skips past both.    
  
He’s not ready to let that go, not just yet. It’s too personal and he’s already shared too much. He’s already given too much away.    
  
So Evan settles on a photo of Connor following a makeup tutorial, the kind that “clown contours”, only the funny thing is that Connor decided that he didn’t want to blend anything and then layered on three different pairs of fake eyelashes, until he could hardly keep his eyes open.    
  
Evan hits post, and within seconds, people are liking and reposting the photos. 

He’s suddenly very glad that he decided not to post any of the  _ Denny’s _ photos.

Evan puts his phone down. But the screen lights up again. 

_ You have: 65 new notifications. Clear?  _

**Author's Note:**

> maybe second chapter??? for the zoe confrontation???? 
> 
> (this is a gays only event tho dont worry)
> 
>  
> 
> also no shade to cali or anything im just salty abt being Basic and i haTE AVOCADO BUT EVERYTHING HAS AVOCADO HERE PLEASE HELP


End file.
